Contents

Usage

This parachute performs almost identically to an Mk16 Parachute, even though it looks a lot smaller when deployed.

All parachutes currently have four activation stages: unactivated, activated, partial deployment, and fully deployed. A parachute becomes activated when it is staged, or when the "deploy" button is clicked and the craft is in flight, or it is triggered through an action group -- the parachute's icon will turn green, but nothing else will happen at that point. Parachutes can be activated only on a craft that has some kind of command module, so it is sometimes important to activate them before they get decoupled from the main craft.

A parachute will automatically go into partial deployment mode if it is activated and then descends below the atmospheric pressure set in its tweakable values. It will automatically go into full deployment if it is already partially deployed, and reaches an altitude above the terrain that is set in the tweakable values.

Right-clicking on the parachute (or looking at the parachute's icon) will give you information on whether the parachute is likely to survive being partially or fully deployed at the craft's current speed. On Kerbin, this parachute can always safely fully deploy at a speed of around 255 meters per second. Safe partial deployment speeds are slightly higher, and depend on atmospheric pressure.

Partial deployment provides a "drogue-like" effect that will hopefully keep your craft falling at a safe medium speed until the parachute fully deploys.

Usage Details

In the current version attempting to activate parachutes and a decoupler on the same stage seems to be dangerous. Sometimes the decoupler activates first and then the parachutes do not activate at all.

It is almost always useful to tweak the tweakable values on these parachutes.

Pressure

The default .04 partial deployment pressure corresponds to an altitude of around 17000 meters on Kerbin. At that altitude a parachute will have almost no effect, and your craft will probably continue to accelerate down to an altitude of 10000 meters - usually destroying your parachute. So keeping this default value is only useful if you intend to manually deploy your parachute at a particular moment.

A pressure value of .2 to .25 will partially deploy a parachute at about 8000 meters on Kerbin. This is a nice value because it is safely above the top of the highest mountains, but the atmosphere usually has enough time to slow your craft to a safe speed. If you think you need a little more time for atmospheric braking and you are willing to risk crashing on a mountaintop with unopened parachutes, you can set the value a little higher.

If you are certain that your craft will land at sea level (or at least below 1000 meters altitude), then you can set the pressure value all the way up to .75, which corresponds to an altitude of 2000 meters on Kerbin.

Altitude

The Mk2-R parachute transitions from partial to full deployment very quickly. So if you do not like waiting while your craft takes forever to drift down those last 1000 meters, you can safely set the altitude for full deployment to 300 or even 200 meters.

Product description

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A parachute comparable to the Mk16 chute, but which is placed radially instead of attached on top of something.